Essential Heavyweight Map Tee

Across the Line
The Smiths' 100 acres lay on the Manchester side of the Palmyra and Manchester town line. Their first house didn't. The family built the log home just north of the line, in Palmyra, by mistake. The frame house they moved into in 1825 stood on the Manchester side.

The Hill
A glacial drumlin, the biggest hill in the area, about three miles south of the Smith farm. Joseph Smith described it as "of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood," near the village of Manchester, with the plates buried on its west side not far from the top.

• September 22, 1823: The day after Moroni's visits, Joseph went to the hill, pried up a stone with a lever, and found the plates in a box of stones set in cement. He was not allowed to take them, and was told to come back on the same day each year.
• September 22, 1827: After four years of meeting the angel there, Joseph took the plates from the hill.
• Early 1928: The Church owned only a farm partway up the west slope, bought in 1923, when the lawyer for the estate of the banker Pliny T. Sexton called the Church's agent, Willard Bean, to his office. Bean came away with the rest of the hill, three farms beside it and the Grange Hall, for $53,000.
• 1930s: Willard and Rebecca Bean planted 65,000 evergreens from the state conservation department on a hilltop farmers had cleared almost bare, plus 3,000 seedlings dug up near the Sacred Grove.
• 1935: President Heber J. Grant dedicated the Angel Moroni Monument on the summit, the work of sculptor Torleif Knaphus.
• September 21, 2025: Elder David A. Bednar rededicated the site, 202 years to the day after Moroni first came to Joseph. Since 2021 crews had taken out 23 pageant buildings and more than nine acres of asphalt and gravel and started the hill back toward forest.

1. The Smith farm on Stafford Road has both of the family's houses. The restored frame house is the one on the Manchester side. The log home, rebuilt on its original foundation, is about 125 yards north, across the town line in Palmyra.
2. The Sacred Grove is the old forest on the west side of the Smith farm. Joseph Smith said God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to him in the woods near his home in the spring of 1820, but nobody can place it more exactly than the wooded part of the farm. The marker stands for the grove itself.
3. The Angel Moroni Monument stands over 30 feet tall at the top of the hill. Moroni points up with his right hand and holds the plates in his left, on a granite column carved with rays of light. The visitors' center at the foot of the hill, on State Route 21, was built in 2002 and has since been renovated. Trails run from it to the top.
4. Manchester village, the landmark Joseph used to place the hill, lies about two miles south of it.
5. The Palmyra New York Temple went up on the east side of the old Smith farm, three miles north of the hill. President Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated it on April 6, 2000.

• Manchester didn't exist under that name when the Smiths arrived. The town was split off from Farmington as Burt in March 1821 and renamed Manchester in April 1822.
• Sexton once asked $100,000 for the hill. Bean told him the Church had done fine without it for nearly a century and could keep waiting.
• The last Hill Cumorah Pageant was performed in July 2019, not 2020. The Church had announced 2020 as the final season, the pandemic pushed that to 2021, and in March 2021 it was called off for good.